Web Hosting Articles

Your domain name is one of the most important distinguishing features your website has, but hosting it can seem like a complex and expensive task. Thankfully, however, this doesn’t actually need to be the case – once you’ve chosen your name it’s not as tricky as you might imagine to find hosting for it that you can afford. Read More

For many years, people had a computer. It was their computer, and everything they used was on it. They might have some work stuff on a computer at work and some home stuff on a computer at home, but that was about as far as the divide went; if you ever needed to have something on the other, you could always transfer it using a floppy, or a CD, or a USB stick. That time has probably now passed. Read More

If you’re looking to launch a website, it’s vitally important that you use the right web host – and if you’re interested in getting into eCommerce it’s more important than ever that you get that part right. This article hopes to serve as a checklist for everything you need to think about while you’re choosing. Read More

You might have heard of ‘cloud hosting’, but it’s a slightly confusing topic for many beginners – which is why we’ve written this article. We’re hoping to demystify what can be a slightly confusing subject, in the hopes of helping you to make the best decision about your own website hosting. Read More

Pretty much all modern web hosting service will come along with some kind of desktop publishing software or content management system, and that means that you're likely to be mostly administrating your website from one of a series of control panels. These can be a little complicated for the uninitiated to understand, so we've written this simple article to help you get to grips with how to use them to their best potential. Read More

There's a lot to go through when you're looking for a new website hosting plan, but one of the most important factors to consider is how much disk space you have. Many shared server plans – which are often very cheap – claim to offer 'unlimited' disk space – this is something of a misnomer, and usually shouldn't be trusted. Read More

There are several different kinds of server on which websites can be hosted. They essentially come in tiers, both of the amount of speed and power they provide and of the amount of space you'll have. Read More

Adult-themed websites have their own requirements and their own considerations, and it's important that you work hard to ensure that the package you choose is able to meet them. Usually, this is a specialised host designed specifically for adult websites; this way, you'll be better placed to run your business your way without too many outside influences controlling what you can and can't do. Read More

Not all web hosts allow adult content to be stored on their servers, which means that if you're hoping to launch a mature-themed website you should make an effort to ensure that the host you choose is happy to look after it for you. If you accidentally host your website somewhere where it goes against the terms of use, you're likely to find that it is taken down and probably deleted with little or no notice and without an opportunity for you to save your files. Read More

One of the most important parts of starting your own website is picking the right domain name. The URL and email addresses you use say a lot about your website and your business or other venture, after all; they're what sets them apart from others, what tells people who you are and what you stand for. Read More

If you've never tried looking for a domain before, you might be wondering if there's a way to find one for free – and in fact there usually is, if you know where to look and if you're prepared to make a few compromises. Read More

There are all kinds of reasons you might wish to be able to transfer your domain to a different web host, and at least one of them is bound to come up at some point if you run a website for long enough. It might be that you realise you can get a better deal elsewhere, or that you want to switch to a different kind of payment system, or that you need to move your website to an alternative server setup.Read More

If you're running a small business, you're likely to have a few specific concerns about your web and domain hosting requirements – and one of those things is doubtless going to be about money. You need a hosting plan that's affordable, but ideally one that also still gives you everything you need from it. So how can you make those mythical plans work out?Read More

There are lots of reasons to make your own website, and not all of them require paid hosting. You might want to consider free hosting if you're trying out a new idea to see if it will take off, or if you're just wanting to make a personal site rather than a commercial one, or if your website's only function is to host a few pages of text somewhere that other people can read them.Read More

Choosing the best domain host can seem a little daunting at first, particularly if you’ve never tried to find one before. Thankfully, it’s not actually as hard as you might imagine – you just need to know what to look for.Read More

There's a lot to think about when you're building a website – but one of the most important things of all is simply making sure that your new site looks right. Thankfully, there are plenty of options; you can pick one of the many tens of thousands of free templates available online, you can purchase a premium template from the internet, you can learn how to build your own template or you can hire someone to create a brand new one especially for you. In this article, we look at some of those options in more depth.Read More

It's really easy to find free web hosting, which is a good thing for many people – but it can mean that some hang onto it for too long, when they would have done better to go for paid hosting earlier. Figuring out how long to keep using a free host and when to switch to a premium plan can be tricky, so we've put together a guide that should help you get to grips with when best to do it. Read More

There are a lot of things you're going to need to make a decision about while you're choosing your hosting plan, but perhaps the most fundamental of them is whether you want to go with a shared server, a virtual server or a dedicated server. Read More

When you buy a hosting plan, you're paying for space on a server that physically exists elsewhere – and for the bandwidth your visitors will use to access what you store on it. There's a lot of variation between different kinds of hosting plan, but one of the most common in the current world are the ones sold by WordPress. Read More

Back in 2003, when WordPress was first launched, its purview was simple – to provide blogs, hosted on subdomains stored on shared servers, to the general public. Now that it's been around for well over a decade, however, that's begun to change a little – you can now use the powerful content management system it provides to create websites of all sorts with which you can do whatever you like.Read More

If you’re looking for plenty of options – options like dedicated servers, virtual machines, cloud hosting and scalable limits – you’re going to need to pay for a subscription to premium website hosting. If you’re a little confused about the ins and outs of getting that done, this article hopes to clear a little of that confusion up. Read More

Everyone knows by now that businesses, however small, need a website. If you don’t have one, your business will gain no traction; it’s both expected and essential, and there’s really no excuse for not doing it. Western society has now reached a point where starting a business without a website is failing at running your business before you’ve even begun.Read More

Running an adult web site is something that comes with plenty of rewards, but it also has its own unique pitfalls – not least that not all hosts will accept them, and if you’re not careful you could end up having your site taken down because you’ve breached a TOU you didn’t even read. The best way to get around this is to keep your site with a web host that specialises in mature and adult content. Read More

There’s a lot to do before website launch day, and one of the most important parts of that is ensuring that your website looks right. Most people hire a professional website designer to do this for them; website design is a tricky skill that takes a long time to learn, and if you want your site to look good you’re really going to need to contact a professional. Read More

It’s more possible than ever before to run a website of your own and to get your words out there onto the internet – but it comes with a few pitfalls, not least when it comes to security. Here are a few of the most important things you should be thinking about when you consider security for your new website.Read More

If you’ve used the internet, you’ve used flash. Loads of websites run on it – particularly any with what are often now called ‘dynamic elements’, like moving bits that respond to your mouse. There are both benefits and drawbacks to using flash on your site, and this article hopes to examine some of them in greater detail to help you make an informed decision.Read More

One of the things you’re going to need to make a decision about when you’re starting a new website is what kind of server you’d like to host it on. This can sound a bit complicated to the uninitiated, so we’ve gone into it in some more detail below. Read More

There are so many choices for web hosts that it can be difficult to know how to make the right decision – and that inevitably leads to some people making mistakes. You don’t have to be one of them, though; you can learn from the mistakes of others, and try to avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls yourself. Read More

During your hunt for the best web hosting for you, you’re likely to find that different companies offer different varieties of features. Some will come as part of your package, while others will cost extra; the important thing is that you carefully consider which you need and which you don’t.Read More

Artists are not necessarily known for their technical expertise – depending on which medium they work in, of course – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important that they have a good website with specially designed features that will showcase their work properly. One of the best ways to do this is to make use of a specialised content management service for artwork hosted online, which will allow you to arrange a gallery or portfolio of photographs and other images of the work you do. Read More

It’s entirely possible to turn a blogging hobby into a full time profession, if enough people are interested in what you have to say and if you’re prepared to put in the hard work required to make it happen. It’s not anything like as easy as people think it is, though – and one of the first things that you can get wrong if you’re not careful is picking your website hosting package. Read More

If you’re a working musician, you’re likely to find that you have a very specific set of web hosting needs that you don’t share with many other people. For one thing, you’re going to need the ability to offer music streaming – something that can take up a lot of bandwidth – and there are plenty of applications and applets that are essential for you that most people will never have to consider. Read More

Anyone hoping to make money by selling things online needs to remember that an internet presence isn’t all that’s necessary – your site needs to be reliable enough to back it all up. But what does that mean, and how can you be sure you’re going to manage it? Read More

If you’re hoping to open an online store of your own, you’re going to need to find good web hosting to support it – including all the various features that set websites like this apart from most. This article hopes to deconstruct some of those features, to help you understand them better.Read More

Every single day, thousands of new domains are registered and new websites published to the internet. Many of them will be personal blogs or niche informational sites about a highly specific topic, but there will always be some that are likely to get more popular – big ecommerce sites, for example, or social networks like forums or chatrooms.Read More

Website security should be important to everyone who owns and runs a website – no matter how small their endeavour. It’s not true that you’ll be safe on the basis of being small and unremarkable; what is true, however, is that scammers, hackers and exploiters are looking out for sites that haven’t protected themselves. You can keep your site from being an easy target just by taking a few simple measures. Read More

‘Uptime’ isn’t a hard concept to grasp – it just means how much time a particular server is able to keep things running without glitches. If a web host says they have "99% uptime", what they mean is that there are only problems with that server 1% of the time – and all the rest of the time your website will be up and running. Read More

These two things are the backbone of the internet, and without them web pages wouldn’t exist at all. Many sites now say they offer ‘unlimited bandwidth’ – meaning that there’s no limit on how many people can view your website at once before it slows down and/or crashes – but what does that really mean? Read More

Setting up an adult website is, in terms of logistics, just the same as setting up any other kind of a website – you still need to look for a hosting service, choose your domain name, check you have enough bandwidth, think about your server storage solution and all the rest of it. The major difference is that you won’t have quite as much choice as you might do otherwise, because there are some unique pitfalls to running an adult site that other webmasters don’t tend to come across. Read on to learn about some of those. Read More

The very first thing you need when you’re looking into creating a website is simple: web hosting. This will give to space to host it, enough bandwidth to make sure that people can actually visit it, and – perhaps most importantly of all – a domain name for people to visit it by. We’ve put together a quick list of some of the basics, to help you get started. Read More

You can’t have a website without website hosting – but sometimes that hosting is prohibitively expensive. If you’re looking for a way to do it more affordably, you might be surprised to learn that many of the free site hosting services aren’t actually as bad as you might have heard them to be – just so long as you’re realistic about your expectations, of course!Read More

It’s actually not always true that free web hosting is definitively inferior to paid hosts – the differences depend mostly on what you need from your host, which is something you should be careful to think about seriously before you commit to a plan. You’ll likely find that security, speed and bandwidth are comparable between the two – it’s all the extras that will make you want to consider paying, rather than the basic requirements of your user experience. Read More

There are two different operating systems that are commonly used to host websites – Windows and Unix. They each have advantages and disadvantages, and while most people agree that on the whole Unix servers are a better choice you’ll find that there are a few circumstances in which a Windows server clearly wins out. Read More

Frequently Asked Questions

For a website to go live (or become viewable) it needs to be "hosted" on a web server. There are companies out there who own servers- and they can rent out space to you, thus hosting your website. There are free web host services available, but these can leave your visitors looking at unwanted pop-ups and advertisements, so many potential website owners opt to pay those in the know to host their content for them.

A domain name is especially important as it is essentially the title in which consumers can use to find your website. In most cases, a domain name will start with the name of your business or brand, and the second part dictates what kind of website viewers will be looking at. For example, ".com" stands for company and is used for businesses, whereas ".gov" is used to determine an official government website. Domain names that end in ".co.uk" (British) or ".com.au" (Australian) usually denote the country in which the site comes from. If your website doesn't have a relevant domain name, no one will know who you are or how to look for you.

Bandwidth is the term used for the amount of data that a website transfers, because of the traffic it receives. This amount is usually regarded on a monthly basis, and the required amount will depend on the website's main purpose. For example, a small blog will usually require minimal bandwidth, whilst large company websites need higher bandwidth to cope with a more substantial amount of users.

Web hosting costs will depend on the company in which you choose, and the type of hosting that you want. Shared hosting is the cheapest option, dedicated servers cost more, and co-located servers are the most expensive of the three.

When you pay for web hosting services, you typically receive one of three levels of account. The cheapest service features shared hosting, which means that your website will share the space on a server with other websites. This isn't usually a problem, but the next level- a dedicated server, will better suit the needs of a busier website. A 'dedicated server' is the term used for space that your website alone inhabits on someone else's server. This means that your website is the only one on a particular server, though the server is still owned by someone else. The third account type is a co-located server, which means you will actually own the space yourself, but you'll still have to pay for someone else house it.

Like bandwidth, disk space also depends on the purpose of the website in question. Each page of a website uses space to some degree, but the more content there is, the bigger the space needs to be. In accordance to this, email files also take up disk space, as do any downloadable files that may need hosting. So, low disk space will suffice for a text-only blog with a small reader base, whereas an e-commerce site will need a higher amount.

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